Posts Tagged ‘halloween’

Happy Monday, readers! Welcome to roundup week at the Pacific Merchants blog. We’ll be bringing you the best we’ve found on the internet to make your pre-Halloween festivities, preparations, Halloween craft session, and YouTube watching marathons the best yet. Here are a few links to get the week started.

1. No-Carve Pumpkin Ideas from Brit + Co. How awesome are these? So many creative ways to approach pumpkin decorating–anyone can do it!

Happy Friday, folks! With Halloween less than three weeks away, we here at Pacific Merchants have been crafting and cooking Halloween projects and recipes like mad people. I spent yesterday afternoon making delicious cakes with our Kilner Jars in preparation for Halloween. For a more refined, friendly, and cute take on the Halloween spirit, this baking project proves a great family activity, but is easy enough to whip up on your own for a party or your home. Surprisingly easy with great opportunity to satisfy everyone’s creative Halloween ideas, and of course, your sweet tooth.

What you’ll need:

-1 box white cake mix or your favorite cake recipe (white cake is great because you can add food coloring to change the color!)

-1-3 Mixing bowls, if you’re making more than one color batter or coloring your frosting.

-Piping Bag/tips (or you can just spread the frosting on)

On to the instructions. Step one: Put a cake in a jar. . . I kid. But really. . .

1. Make sure your jars are clean. It’s really important when using any canning or preserve jars to make sure they’re clean: You don’t have to sterilize them like you would if actually canning something, but just make sure you clean them before baking in them.

2. Preheat oven according to your box or cake recipe.

3. The only part of these jars that shouldn’t go in the oven is that orange rubber seal. See it? It’s super easy to remove: just pull at the tab and it should pop right off. If you’re using preserve jars, just leave the lids out of the oven.

4. Grease your jars! Easy to forget, so I’m putting this step up front. Non-stick spray comes in handy here as jars are harder to grease than an open pan.

5. Batter time! I used white cake to match any frosting or decoration I would later adorn the cake with. I kept the batter white, but try making some green, purple, or red batter for a more intense Halloween cake experience! I dyed the frosting, hence why I recommend using white frosting as well. Our Mason Cash Mixing Bowls are great for batter making. They’re easy to clean, big enough to mix up a huge batch of batter, and the white interior makes it easy to see when all your color is blended in (if you’re coloring your dough.)

6. Pour batter into Kilner Jars, filling up about half way. The cake will expand and rise in the oven, bringing the top of the cake right above the lip of the jar. If you want to be able to close the clip top jars completely including frosting/decorations, pour batter a little less than halfway full. Making cakes in jars that you can close makes for a great hostess gift, school lunch treat (use a smaller jar) or holiday gift!

7. Place jars on a baking sheet or pain, and stick ‘em in the oven. I kept mine in for 43 minutes. The batter densely sits in these jars, so I followed directions for a bundt cake on my boxed cake mix, versus a 8” or 9” pan or cupcakes. Plus or minus a few minutes won’t hurt anyone.

8. Keep an eye on the cakes when they’re in the oven. They’re ready when you can stick a toothpick or knife through the center of the cake and it comes out clean.

9. Take out, and let cakes cool completely before going to town with icing/decorations. We don’t want messy melting icing (unless you do).

10. Once cakes are cool, frost those babies. I put whipped white frosting in a piping bag with a professional piping tip to get that cool star effect. You can also just use a hefty zip-top bag with a professional tip, or no tip, just cut the corner off; it just won’t have that star effect. You can even just use a butter knife and spread the icing on smoothly. Two of the cakes I frosted with plain white frosting, and the third cake I frosted with my own mixed green frosting. Get creative here! Mix and match your cake color with your frosting color and/or decorations. Decorate with sprinkles, candy corn, sugar eyeballs, or cupcake flags. Most kitchen supply stores and even some big craft stores like Michaels have awesome sugar bats, pumpkins, ghouls, etc. Drip with red food coloring for a more gruesome cake.

11. Grab two spoons, a scarfing partner, and go to town. Or just tackle that cake solo; that may or may not have been what I did. Enjoy!

Tune in next week for some awesome Halloween roundups and DIY projects, brought to you by yours truly. Now go have a craft-tastic weekend!

In my humble opinion, October is one of the best months of the year, second only to November (I love Thanksgiving…really I just love to eat). The leaves are changing. I always feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Sweaters, boots, Pumpkin Spice Lattes. What’s not to like?

*Evil Laugh*

Another October/Halloween staple: Jack-O’-Lanterns. The Jack-O’-Lantern tradition originated in Scotland and Ireland, but infiltrated American Halloween culture a lonnnnnggggggg time ago. I love pumpkins and I have a slight obsession with Kilner Jars so I decided to combine the two into one of the most awesome Halloween crafts ever . For my twist on a classic Halloween tradition, check out this Kilner Jar-O’-Lantern tutorial. It’s a great craft to do with even the littlest kids. As long as they can hold a paintbrush, they’ll have a blast!

1. For every craft project I start, I love to sketch out my ideas.This is a great way to get your creativity flowing and try out an idea without the commitment. OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA This step is especially useful if you’re crafting with kids; it can really help focus and harness the wild and undirected energy kids sometimes approach projects with, and you can always send them back to work on it if they’re freaking out about what’s next. Sound familiar? Some questions to help the kiddos brainstorm:

-Do I want my Jack-O’-Lantern to be friendly? Scary? Silly?
-What simple shapes can I use to make the face?
-Do I want to make a design, pattern, or silhouette instead of a face?
-What colors do I want to use?
-Does my Jack-O’-Lantern have a story? Write down or draw that story.

2. Coat the inside of the Kilner jar with one layer of acrylic paint.

If you want the final product to be a little more opaque, slap on another coat or two after the first one dries.

I recommend using a hairdryer on the COOL setting in between coats. It can be tricky to paint the inside of the jar, but it gives you that clean, glossy finish without having to paint or spray on a clear coat at the end. Patience and a longer paintbrush will get you there, I promise! It’s also possible to decoupage the outside of the jar with tissue paper and modge podge if you like that texture and process, but it’s a little more involved and messy. Trying to minimize cleanup, here! For adults: spray paint the exterior. It will look smoother, but it’s not as kid friendly.

3. Let the paint dry. In the mean time, if you sketched out a plan when you started, revisit it. Think about how you want to approach “carving” your jar.

4. Time to carve! When I’ve done this project in the past with kids, I draw on the glass with a Sharpie or other permanent marker in the places I want to black out. If you mess up, it’s super easy to take off the marker with an alcohol swab, so that’s really convenient.

5. Outline the face or design you want blacked out. When you’re done, fill in with the permanent marker. You can also create stencils out of masking tape using a utility knife, but have an adult do this! Another reason painting the inside of the jar is more convenient.

6. Let the jar dry. When completely dry, we recommend sticking in a flameless tea light; this allows you to close the jar (either preserve jars or clip top jars), and minimizes fire risk. They’re just as pretty, more kid friendly, less likely to melt your paint, and you won’t have to replace them throughout the night. Win, win! Thanks to the bright colors, the jars are also eye catching during the day without candles.

7. Enjoy, and bask in the glory of your finished product. These Jar-O’-Lanterns make great hostess gifts, school party projects, and party decorations. Also, add some mummies to the mix with our Kilner Mummy Lanterns.

Tune in Friday for another Halloween jar project. . . a craft so delicious that you’ll think you went trick-or-treating 2 weeks early!

Halloween is upon us! Time to start decorating, if you haven’t already. This week at the Pacific Merchants blog we’ll be providing you lovely readers with three simple, creative, and fun DIY projects to make your October more Halloweeny for you and your family. These crafts do double duty as a fun activity for the whole family and great, seasonal decor, so get started early and enjoy these all month long. Ready? Let’s do this thing. Mummies. Kilner Jars. Tea Lights. Put them together, and what do you get? Mummy Lanterns. Heck yes. Set your eyes on one of our favorite Halloween Crafts. It’ll stare right back at you.

Read on for an easy, fun, festive tutorial on converting our lovely Kilner jars into your own friendly mummy lanterns. They make the best friends/pets ever; super low maintenance, and they don’t think twice about you talking to them for two hours straight. Plus you’ll be the coolest crafter on the block this Halloween season.

2. Time to wrap these little guys. Place a few dabs of hot glue on the glass to fix the gauze in place. Watch out for your fingers! Hot glue guns/glue can be surprisingly painful. We don’t want to use any of that first aid gauze on you… If you’re doing this with kids, it might be wise to have adults take charge of the hot glue gun. Kids can still do all the wrapping once the gauze is glued in place.

3. Continue to wrap the jar in gauze, evenly or overlapping/folding if you want something chunkier. Make sure to fix the gauze down with a small bead of hot glue every once and a while and tighten the wrap on the gauze so it doesn’t unravel. If you plan on sealing the jars after (on either a preserve jar or a clip top jar), don’t cover the lip of the jar with gauze, else the cap won’t screw on or clip on.

4. Once you’re done wrapping the Kilner Jar, it’s time to googly-eye this mummy. I was so pleasantly surprised with the insane variety of googly craft eyes that are now available on the market (at Michael’s)…SO AWESOME. They have different color irises, eyelids, and even eyelashes, so you can fully customize your mummy to your hearts content.

Playing with the scale of your mummy faces is a great way to inject humor into this project; I love putting big eyes on small jars, and small eyes on larger jars. It just makes them total characters. But, it’s obviously up to you and your creative genius to figure out what your mummies look like.

5. If you are looking to make more gory mummies, feel free to drip red food coloring down the sides of the gauze.

6. Stick in a flameless tea light, and enjoy! We at Pacific Merchants strongly advocate flameless tealights/candles, as they’re more family/kid friendly. You can also close the Kilner jars without the fire going out, and they come in many different colors! Great option for dorm rooms, apartments, playrooms, or anywhere you don’t want/can’t have open flames.